A Duchess Who Made Blue Blood Curdle

‘Powder Her Face’ From City Opera at BAM

The chatter about “Powder Her Face,” the British composer Thomas Adès’s 1995 debut opera about a real-life sex scandal among the British aristocracy, generally gravitates toward a single, conspicuous point in the work: an aria that not only accompanies an act of oral sex but simulates it.

In the new production by New York City Opera, which opened Friday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, however, the chatter is liable to center on another detail from the scene that includes the notorious aria. While the Duchess, the opera’s main character, reflects upon her circumstances as the promiscuous wife of the Duke of Argyll, 25 fully naked men amble out of her bed, bathtub and armoire, stretching and lolling like drowsy cats.

What is remarkable about Mr. Adès’s wordless aria, once you get past the novelty of its mere existence, is its lack of sex appeal. The music, a slithering sequence of gasps, gurgles and spasmodic rhythms, intentionally both aspires to seductiveness and conveys clumsiness, vulnerability and animal urges. The aria crystallizes a think-again sophistication that permeates this astonishing, precocious masterpiece.

At the Brooklyn Academy, where “Powder Her Face” was previously performed semi-staged in 1998, the director Jay Scheib’s treatment of that scene suits Mr. Adès’s musical double entendre. The naked men are meant to suggest the Duchess’s extramarital affairs, her fleshy field of conquest. But as staged here few of the men pay much attention to the Duchess, heroically portrayed by Allison Cook, the British mezzo-soprano. Most are glued to a television screen on which footage of the Duke having sex with a maid plays in an endless, jerky loop.

Photo

Powder Her Face Allison Cook and William Ferguson in Thomas Adès’s opera from New York City Opera at Brooklyn Academy of Music.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

That dalliance had played out live immediately before, with Nili Riemer, an agile, magnetic coloratura soprano, as the Maid, and Matt Boehler, a chameleonic bass, as the Duke. As they cavorted, an onstage camera operator, Chelsey Blackmon, splashed the scene on a wall, larger than life. The camera, a frequent interloper, elsewhere projects scenes of casual drug abuse and mundane bodily function. This, along with constant flashbulb bursts, is a reminder of the opera’s sordid tabloid roots, and one of Mr. Scheib’s cleverer touches.

The first act opens in 1990 in the hotel room where the Duchess lives; the Maid and an Electrician — William Ferguson, a mellifluous, charismatic tenor — ridicule the Duchess’s excesses to the tune of fragmented tango and distorted snatches of Cole Porter. The action moves swiftly and brazenly through flashbacks that reveal the Duchess’s extravagances. Two silent characters, a Waiter (Jon Morris) and a Nurse (Kaneza Schaal), enhance the staging’s kinetic feel, usually without being unduly distracting.

Not everything Mr. Scheib brings to the second act feels quite as assured or fitting. The feet of an anonymous kneeling man protruding from under the desk at which the Judge (Mr. Boehler) pontificates extravagantly about the Duchess’s infamy are obvious enough in their intent. Otherwise the lock-step choreography of that scene feels borrowed and aimless, the point of trees planted around the set unclear.

But from here Ms. Cook took the remainder of the show onto her shoulders, moving with consummate insight and dignity through one of contemporary opera’s most psychologically nuanced sequences. Mr. Adès and his librettist, Philip Hensher, provide a Duchess unbowed, pitiable despite her most monstrous pronouncements about societal decay. Ms. Cook rose to the task, her Duchess a dark reflection of Strauss’s Marschallin for an age in which noblesse is no longer obliged.

There was considerably more to appreciate. Marsha Ginsberg’s simple, stately rooms seemed to breathe and warp of their own accord. Alba Clemente’s costumes treated luxury with a hint of sarcastic excess. Jonathan Stockhammer, the conductor, supervised a vibrant, exacting account of this complex, haunting work. At the end the ovations were long and loud — none more so than the one afforded Mr. Adès.